Needless to say, the Silicon Valley Earthquake has been an instant wellspring of tasteless jokes, with baseball fans saying that while it must be demeaning to be losing so heavily to the down-home Oakland As, hadn’t the Giants gone a bit too far to get the carnage stopped; politicos saying that surely San Franciscans had enough to put up with without President Bush dispatching Dan Quayle to the scene, and the computer industry commenting that while we all know that IBM was desperate for an excuse to delay shipping its new disk drives indefinitely, didn’t devastating half of Silicon Valley amount to overkill.